Thursday, October 01, 2009

Newest Guest Blogger: Greg Allen!

For years, our man Greg Allen has been a loyal Hooptyrides and D+R reader. When discussing art and losing our way in the tall grass, Greg would gracefully nudge us in the right direction. From Donald Judd's Land Rover to mercenary New York auction houses, Greg invariably would fill in our missing facts and keep us straight. What's unusual is the information that he was conveying was so generously shared and so consistently interesting that we didn't mind being corrected! Now, that is rare!

Ladies and gentleman, we present, Greg and his bio follows:
Short bio [which got long]: I used to make a lot of spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations, but I quit in 2001 to make documentaries. Mostly, I collect contemporary art so I can hang out with artists. But since there's no one to collect one from, I realized if I want a 100-ft diameter aluminum mylar satelloon, I'd have to make it myself. So I'm currently researching the history of NASA's original Project Echo and its connection to both Minimalism and Andy Warhol. All that has led me to start making other things, too. I worked for Disney [suit, not costume] right out of business school. My wife Jean is an x-ray astrophysicist at NASA, so we shuttle back and forth between Washington DC and New York City. Or we did, until our second daughter was born. I publish and The first car I bought was a Citroen 2CV. I like Red Vines over Twizzlers, tobiko over ikura, Iceland over England, and Diet Coke over Coke Zero. Clearly, I'm just pulling stuff out of the air at this point.